A customer contact center typically must balance the quality of service that it provides against the cost of providing such service. When personalized service is needed, an automatic call distribution system (or ACD) typically connects a customer to a contact center agent who has the skills that are needed to service the customer. The agent serves only one customer at a time. This personalized treatment generally leads to a high quality of service, with the main limitation on the quality of service being the number of available agents, but it can be very expensive. Additional problems are that an agent typically repeatedly handle the same requests and customers often must wait in long queues at busy times. Customers waiting in queues typically have the choice to either continue waiting in the queue or call back at a later time.
To reduce costs, many contact centers offer some form of automated self-service, such as an interactive voice response (IVR) system, to customers. Each customer is connected to a separate port of the IVR system for service. The cost of providing service via the IVR system is generally substantially lower, but a desirable quality of service is not always achieved, as the IVR system is not as flexible and responsive as a human agent. Moreover, some customers are reluctant to use such systems.